Which brings us to Better Call Saul, the highly anticipated prequel to Breaking Bad, with sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) as the central character. Listening to executive producer, writer and director Vince Gilligan talk about Better Call Saul at the Television Critics Association event, it's apparent he is well aware of the reverse-Homer prejudices.

“It's like re-inventing the wheel, but sometimes you can re-invent the wheel to a fault,” Gilligan said. “Sometimes re-inventing the wheel is not the most intelligent way of going about it.

“It's important to us that this not look like a carbon copy of Breaking Bad. We're doing our damndest to make it as different as possible.”

So what do we know about Better Call Saul at this point?

Well, we now know, thanks to Gilligan, that the world of Better Call Saul initially is set in the year 2002, although the series will jump around in time a bit, as did Breaking Bad.

“We never completely nailed down when Breaking Bad took place,” Gilligan said. “We were shooting the pilot in 2007. On Breaking Bad, if you noticed, we tried hard to not be too specific as to when it was, and now we have to kind of be a little more specific than sometimes we're comfortable with.

“In one of the first meetings, our Teamster captain who was in charge of finding picture vehicles and our hair and makeup folks and everybody was saying to us, 'So, 2002?' And I said, 'Yeah,' and they said, 'Well, we need period-specific cars,' and I'm like, 'Oh yeah, right.' I hesitate to say it, but it is indeed a period piece. It feels like (2002) was yesterday, but it was 12 years ago.”

Additionally, we know that Michael McKean has been hired to play Saul's brother Chuck.

“I could talk to (McKean) all day about Spinal Tap on the set,” Gilligan said.

But on top of that, we know that even though Better Call Saul has begun shooting, the debut time-frame has been pushed back from its original fall 2014 to early 2015. Gilligan took full personal responsibility for the delay, claiming that he could have met the initial deadline had it been imperative, but he is “slow as mud” as a TV writer, and always has been.

“We had a pace, thanks to AMC and Sony, on Breaking Bad that was deliciously stately for television,” Gilligan said. “It's nothing they wanted. It's nothing any studio or network would want. But we have a way of doing things that is slower than most TV shows. We want to think everything through, and we feel that pays dividends. So here we are doing it again. It's also the entire reason our final 16 episodes of Breaking Bad were broken up, eight and eight. There was no desire on anybody's part to sort of elongate it artificially.

“It's daunting - it's always daunting. Of course, if it were a completely new show and a whole new universe, I'd be daunted to an equal level and capacity. I believe this to be a different kind of 'dauntment', if there is such a word.